Who Controls the Internet?, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu (Oxford, £16.99)

Remember the 1990s, when everyone was telling us that the internet was going to consign geography to history and spread freedom? It didn't happen quite like that. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu's book explains why. Even if governments can't coerce foreign companies who are operating on the internet directly, they can certainly coerce essential intermediaries - from banks to internet service providers - in their own territory. Conversely, companies need to rely on governments' threat, in the last resort, of physical coercion against citizens. Increasingly, the internet is devolving into regional internets controlled by political entities, as with China's massively firewalled system.

The law-scholar authors explain a number of case studies - including Yahoo's collaboration with China and the battle of filesharers with the record industry - in admirably clear and concise fashion. Sometimes it reads with the zip of an investigative thriller, especially the narrative of a famous attempt by one of the web's founding engineers to wrest "root power" over the network for citizens. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and ultimate authority over the foundation of the internet rests with the American military.

The Rich, by William Davis (Icon, £16.99)

People are too hard on the rich, says the author of this curious book, promising a peek into the flamboyant lifestyles of the wealthy with whom he consorts. First we meet each exemplary type, and then we are told excitedly about yachts, houses and charitable donations. There are variations between species. The aristocrats, as the author wryly notes, "have an insatiable urge to kill birds". Then there are the entrepreneurs, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who "buys about 10 books a month, and reads three", Hugh Hefner and the amiable Stelios. Next come Russian oligarchs, actors, film directors and other moguls. There are some cute anecdotes, among them how the founder of FedEx first dreamed up the idea at Yale and wrote a paper about it, only to get a grade C for its impracticality. However, the information does not appear always to be entirely reliable. Historians of computing will scratch their heads in bafflement over the bizarre claim that Bill Gates "worked closely with Apple" on the development of the original Macintosh. Er, not exactly.

The Form of Things, by AC Grayling (Orion, £12.99)

Those expecting an especially Platonic compilation from the philosopher may have been misled by the title, but it is no doubt becoming difficult to find continuations of the figure used for his previous collections The Meaning of Things, The Reason of Things and The Heart of Things. Here are more of his enjoyably acerbic and fruitfully slanted interventions for the newspapers, on subjects such as colour, modern dance, divorce, hedonism, biotechnology, time ("an average human life [...] is less than a thousand months long"), fox-hunting, and voyaging by ship. When, in the brief section of belletristic appreciations of writers and painters, the subject cannot be steered round to a jaunty philosophical riff, the author may be lured into platitude (Vermeer's paintings like "a novel in oils"), but the quality of argument is generally high. Best is a bravura long essay on the undesirability of ID cards.